


Memento Mori

by lirin



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 03:38:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14488011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: Jane. Ned. Shuri. Snap.





	1. Jane

When Jane wakes up, there's an alert on her Einstein–Rosen bridge detector. Dark energies must have been released sometime during the night. Scrolling through data with one hand, she turns on the TV with the other. She already knows what she'll see. Sure enough, every channel is showing a spaceship over New York, and superheroes battling in the streets with powerful aliens. She doesn't see Thor in any of the footage, but she knows he must be there somewhere. Who else would arrive via Einstein–Rosen bridge?

She hopes the battle went okay. None of the news anchors seems to know much about what happened, just that the spaceship was there and now it's gone. She could lean on some of her connections—surely there's still at least a few decent people at S.H.I.E.L.D. who will pick up the phone if she calls—but she doesn't think she'll bother. If Thor can't be fussed to visit while he's in the area, that's on him. For Jane's part, she'll concentrate on studying the aftereffects of the Einstein–Rosen event. Asgard doesn't seem to have been using the Bifrost much lately, so she needs to gather as much data as she can from what events do present themselves.

 

The energies taper off quickly, but she's still studying the vestiges of them more than twenty-four hours later. Darcy is there too, chewing gum and sorting papers for her. "Whoa, look at this!" Darcy calls from her seat at Jane's desk. "It's even bigger than the last one!"

Jane scrambles to look. Sure enough, it's another Einstein–Rosen bridge, and it's huge. It's centered over East Africa. Wakanda, the computer screen flashes as it analyzes the initial readings. Jane tries to remember what she's heard about Wakanda. It was in the news relatively recently...the king or prime minister or something was giving a speech about openness, but she doesn't remember any of the specifics. She'd been too busy with data to pay much attention to politics, same as always.

"Check on the instruments," Jane tells Darcy. "Make sure they're all working. This is one of the biggest events I've ever seen, and I want to make sure we can get every single piece of data that we can." Darcy hurries up to the roof to check the calibration of the main spectrometer, and Jane takes her vacated place at the desk. She stares happily at the computer screen, and watches the numbers come rolling in. This event is absolutely incredible!

She spares a thought for Thor. He's probably battling aliens right now. Maybe he'll come say hi afterwards. That would be nice. Just because they aren't in a relationship anymore doesn't mean they can't spend time together once in a while, right? She could probably use the excuse to take a break from work. A nice, muscly break.

"Jane?" She can hear Darcy's footsteps on the stairs, loud and quick like she's running. Then they stop. Somewhere outside, a siren starts to wail. She'd better go check on Darcy, although Darcy probably just didn't want to bother her.

Jane stands up from the desk. Come to think of it, she feels rather odd. Her head is spinning a bit. Maybe she'd better sit down. Darcy's probably fine.

She turns back to her chair, but she never sits down.

Later that day, Selvig finds the door unlocked and the analysis running, but no sign of anyone there. He's able to guess what happened, though. It's all over the news.


	2. Ned

They never make it to MoMA.

Traffic all over the city is at a standstill as everybody stares up at the spaceship. When it leaves, the school bus driver herds them all back into the bus, but before he can manage to go more than a few yards in the still-barely-moving traffic, his radio goes off. They're supposed to come back to school immediately; everybody's parents are freaking out, so students are being sent home for the day.

Ned hopes Peter wasn't on the ship when it left. His suit can do a lot of stuff, but Ned's pretty sure it doesn't function like a spacesuit. And besides, he doesn't have Ned there to be the guy in the chair.

When they get back to school, every TV is playing footage of a battle with aliens. Iron Man is there, and some other random guys that Ned doesn't recognize, and of course Spider-Man. Ned watches as much as he can, but none of it shows what happened to Spider-Man in the end. Maybe he's lying injured somewhere in the streets, unnoticed by the other superheroes. Ned will just have to do something about that. To the rescue!

In the kerfuffle, nobody at school has noticed Peter's absence, so it's unlikely they'll notice Ned's either. Unfortunately, the subway isn't running, and Ned has to walk all the way to the site of the battle. The wreckage extends for blocks. The streets look absolutely shredded; those aliens must have been really powerful.

There's cops all over the place, keeping everybody out, but Ned does the best he can. He walks around the perimeter, yelling for Peter, and he sneaks through the barrier and looks under a few promising-looking chunks of concrete before the cops catch up with him and throw him out. Nothing.

He checks his phone to see if Peter's called him. Nothing from Peter, but half a dozen missed calls from his mom and like a million texts. "Im fine, caught a ride with a friend, studying for chem test," he texts her back, and makes sure the ringer is silenced so he can claim not to hear her next thousand calls.

His legs are already killing him, but he's not done yet. He has to go find Peter's Aunt May. She's the only other person who knows who Peter is—well, except for the Avengers and who knows what other superheroes. Ned owes it to her to tell her where Peter went, since he's the only one who knows.

 

May serves him tea and risotto and doesn't cry once while Ned tells his story, although she looks like she wants to. She phones his mom and patches things up with her. ("It would be so much easier if Ned just spent the night here with us. You can't expect him to walk all the way home with the subway shut down, and the boys can spend tomorrow studying for their chemistry test, since school is cancelled.") Then they sit down in front of the television, and listen to all the news anchors speculate with less information than even Ned and May have. He hopes Peter will come back soon.

He hopes Peter will come back.

 

The next morning, they drag themselves back to the couch in front of the TV as soon as they wake up. May brews a big pot of coffee, and they settle back in for another day full of nobody-knows-what's-going-on.

"Oh!" May exclaims, much later, as the footage shows Iron Man swooping down a street for the ten millionth time. "Do you think Peter has his number saved anywhere?"

They ransack Peter's room, for lack of anything better to do. They don't find Iron Man's phone number, but one of Peter's battered spiral notebooks has a number labeled "Happy" in it. Ned's pretty sure that Peter mentioned a Happy once, as somebody connected to Iron Man. Well, he's a little bit sure.

"I don't care how sure you are, it's worth a try," May says, already dialing. "Hello? Hi! This is May Parker. Do you know my nephew Peter? That's g— What?" She turns pale. "Are you sure? Oh...hello? Hello?" She holds the phone away from her head. "I don't know what happened; he cut out in the middle of a word. He said he thinks Peter went on the spaceship with Iron Man. Do you think—" She gasps suddenly. "What..." Suddenly, her body just disintegrates. It shreds into tatters that fall to the ground in front of Ned. The cell phone bounces off of his shoe.

Heart pounding faster than it had even when he saw the spaceship, Ned reaches for the phone. "Is there anybody there? Please, can anybody hear me? What's happening?"

But nobody answers.


	3. Shuri

Mama is the first sign of how terribly wrong things have gone.

She walks up as Shuri is staring up at her battered laboratory. Despite the destruction around them, she is stately and calm, as befits a queen. "Did they capture the Stone?"

"I'm not sure," Shuri says. "I tried to stop them, but I think they did. We should have left more guards at the lab instead of deploying everybody to the barrier."

"I'm just glad you're safe," Mama says. She reaches in for a quick hug. "You should return to the palace with me, and then we will tell your brother—"

Suddenly, Shuri is hugging nothing but a few scraps that slide to the ground and blow away in the wind. "Mama? Mama!" She can't be gone, not like that. It's too sudden. She must be hallucinating.

In the distance, Thanos's forces have retreated. Is it because Wakanda and the Avengers managed to chase them off, or because they obtained their goal? Shuri fears the latter.

She hurries up the stairs to her lab. Although the lab can't be the solace and retreat for her that it usually is, at the moment, it's her best source of weapons—and communications. Besides, the height will give her a better vantage point on the battlefield.

The access to comms doesn't help as much as she'd hoped, for nobody answers her calls. The aliens must have knocked out their comms somehow. She ought to study all frequencies and figure out how they did it, how to fix it, and how to avoid the same problem in the future. Failing that, she ought at least to grab a few grenades and a gun and head back to the palace, where she'll be safer. But she doesn't do any of those things. She sits at her workbench and thinks of Mama, and how her body had disintegrated into dust that slipped through her fingers like rain.

Okoye finds her there some time later: Shuri isn't sure whether it's been hours or days. The look on Okoye's face tells her everything that she doesn't want to know, but she refuses to believe it. She's already lost Mama, and Papa too not long ago. That's enough, and far more than enough. Nothing else bad must happen. Please.

"My queen," Okoye says, and there's no way she can lie to herself any longer once those two words have been uttered. "Thanos's forces have retreated. We need to go back to the palace to discuss our next move."

Shuri stands up and stumbles after her, blinking through a haze of pain that she's sure will never end.


End file.
